North Korea’s state media said Wednesday that its leader Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump shared the view that “step-by-step” and “simultaneous” actions are important to achieve peace and denuclearization.

Trump also announced on Tuesday that the us would cease its joint military drills with South Korea – an apparent concession to Pyongyang, which has repeatedly claimed that the drills are merely a pretext for a strike on the North.

“But we believe it is necessary to come up with various measures to improve dialogue more smoothly”, the Blue House said.

The South Korean president’s office said there were no immediate plans for three-way talks between the Koreas and the U.S. to sign a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War.

The U.S. had previously said it would never make such a move because the military exercises were part of its military alliance with South Korea and served as a deterrent to Kim Jong-un.

“I was surprised”, he said, according to a report by Breaking Defense.

By signing the Singapore joint statement, Washington has been put on notice of the Panmunjom Declaration. “I hope it will be eventually”. Kim also reaffirmed a longstanding commitment by Pyongyang to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.

Before Trump and Kim sat at the table, one aide is seen wiping down the pen his leader was supposed to use with some kind of cloth.

Stalin’s poop-collectors reportedly swiped the waste from Mao Zedong, the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, from special toilets they built for his 1949 visit to Moscow. But, you know what?

That four-point agreement had scant detail about how to verify any steps North Korea takes toward complete and irreversible denuclearisation. When asked why, Trump said on Tuesday: “Because there’s no time”. I’m here one day. “Trump delivered it while getting nothing in return beyond the same generalities that North Korea has been offering since the early 1990s”.

While expressing cautious optimism about events of the past 48 hours, Bishop stressed the strength of the agreement between Trump and Kim Jong-un “will only be as good as the verification process that North Korea allows”.

“Everybody is interested in the summit right now”, she said.

Kim Yong Chol has spent almost 30 years in the intelligence community, including a stint as chief of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Korea’s main spy agency.

“We understand what the United States and its allies mean”. Whether Kim will plump for his hardline former spy chief Kim Yong Chol or genteel career diplomat, Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho, could provide a clue on what approach Pyongyang will take at the talks, political analysts and experts on North Korea said.

Washington has described the drills as defensive in nature, but Pyongyang says they are a rehearsal for invasion and has long called for them to end. He also said he’d like to remove all 28,500 US troops stationed in the South, although he made clear this was an option for the future, not a part of current negotiations.

Trump also said he hopes the thaw in relations with North Korea will eventually allow him to withdraw USA troops from the peninsula. And not by accident South Korea wants to connect deeper with both BRI and the EAEU. Also, by letting North Korea dictate what the U.S. military does, Trump sends the USA down a slippery slope.